Police Violence in Backsliding Brazil

• In Event: Issues in International and Comparative Politics

Abstract

Scholars have spent decades studying how and why democracies break down, internationally. According to Nancy Bermeo, despite the breadth of the term, backsliding denotes “the state-led debilitation or elimination of any of the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy”. Despite the “myriad” of institutions that sustain each particular existing democracy, scholars have failed to examine one of the most controversial, yet integral facets of a democratic state: the police. The sustenance of a democracy is largely dependent upon the ways in which an electorate is policed. The correlations between an incumbent’s utilization of the police and the state of democracy under said incumbency is most apparent in the case of Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro from 2019 to 2022. What effect do the processes of backsliding have on an electorate’s interaction with state actors? How does an incumbent administration overseeing the processes of backsliding view and interact with the police? Is violent policing more prevalent in backsliding democracies? While abuses of power may be a function of backsliding, the literature operationalized in this research aims to suggest that backsliding doesn’t inevitably lead to violent policing, but enables it.

Author

• Marcus David Moore, Drexel University